Customer Effort Score

Find out why or why not Customer Effort Score (CES) outperforms Net Promoter and Customer Satisfaction scores. Is it better to satisfy rather than delight? Should 'making it easy' for your customers be your biggest priority?

Customer Effort Score (CES) is measured by asking a single question: “How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?”

18 April 2012

The Customer Effort Score has got a lot of airplay – claiming to be the only Customer Service Metric that you would need.

In this article Guy Fielding looks at these claims, and finds that although Customer Effort is a good supporting indicator, it cannot be used as the primary Customer Service Metric.

In summer 2010, when Dixon, Freeman and Toman published their HBR paper “Stop trying to delight your customers” they not only offered hard pressed customer service people a tantalising hint of a less demanding service standard.